The following classroom (and other) resources are made available to members of the global education network Community Philosophy and the Climate Crisis and to other interested parties. If you wish to join our network, please read our Ethos and Aims and then contact Michelle to be added to the Google Group.

Contents – please scroll down for details

1 (a) THE PHILOSOPHY CLUB’S CLASSROOM RESOURCES

• High school/adult philosophy workshop: Climate Action: Why Act Now? 
• High school/adult philosophy workshops: So Entitled – Human nature, human rights, legal personhood and the basis of rights
• High school philosophy: Some possible lines of inquiry for a lesson on landcare
• Upper primary/junior high school workshop: Too Small to Make a Difference? Climate action and active hope
• Upper primary/junior high school workshop: ‘Nor Any Drop to Drink’: Water ethics
• Upper primary/junior high school workshop: Nature and De-extinction
• Primary school philosophy module: Wild and Free
• Children’s Assembly on climate and ecological issues in Victoria, Australia
• Recommended books (mostly picture books) for young readers on themes relevant to ecological citizenship
• Junior primary school philosophy workshop: Fitting In and Standing Out
• Materials for a ‘Reflective Drawing’ art workshop on philosophical themes

1 (b) CLASSROOM RESOURCES FROM OTHER SOURCES

• ‘Of Fences’ by Peter Worley: Narrative stimulus and discussion questions on the theme of property ownership

2. THE PHILOSOPHY CLUB’S OTHER RESOURCES

• Relevant posts on The Philosophy Club’s blog
• A very short film about institutional power and accountability
• Reflections on current events and issues, from our facebook page Young Environmental Philosophers

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1 (a) THE PHILOSOPHY CLUB’S CLASSROOM RESOURCES

High school/adult philosophy workshop: Climate Action: Why Act Now? 

Original materials shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. Other materials are owned by those credited.

You can download the 80-minute workshop plan. Accompanying resources are below:

• This workshop assumes a level of knowledge as outlined in these Climate emergency background information slides (Keynote) (References here). 
• View the abridged video from Greta Thunberg’s TED talk, to be screened during the introduction to the workshop.
• Download the set of eight stimulus cards and hope vs. despair swingometer (arrows to be hand-drawn by students) used as stimuli for Part 1: ‘Hope or Despair?’ Note: This activity was designed by Grace Lockrobin of Thinking Space (UK).
• Download the Greta Thunberg quote and image for group discussion in Part 2.
• Download the ‘Why act now?’ activity description and printable cards for the inquiry activity in Part 3, in which students work in small groups to rank a given set of reasons for climate action, and to consider their justification for prioritising some reasons over others, before opening to a whole-class discussion. Note: This resource was adapted by The Philosophy Club from an educational activity designed by Green-Schools Ireland.

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High school/adult philosophy workshops: So Entitled – Human nature, human rights, legal personhood and the basis of rights

Original materials shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. Other materials are owned by those credited.

You can download the workshop plans for ‘So Entitled’, our two-hour philosophical enquiry into rights and legal personhood. The first workshop includes a card sorting activity (as described in the workshop plan) using these printable cards and headers to identify what it is about being human that entitles us to rights. The second workshop includes a series of video clips which invite discussion of such questions as ‘Should rights be granted on the basis of capacities or needs?’ and ‘Should rights always be accompanied by responsibilities?’ Accompanying video clips are: Chimpanzee mirror self-recognition (edited excerpts) (apologies for watermark), ‘The Corporation’ (edited excerpts), ‘The River is Me’ (edited excerpts), and ‘Animals – Property or Persons?‘ (by Voiceless Australia).

Note that we have created a different version of the above workshop to suit contexts where it is not possible to use audio-visual stimuli. It runs a little shorter, at 1.75 hours in total. You can download the A.V.-free version of the ‘So Entitled’ workshop plans. You will still need to use the printable cards and headers linked in the paragraph above.

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High school philosophy: Some possible lines of inquiry for a lesson on landcare

Original materials shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. Other materials are owned by those credited.

These lines of inquiry, while not amounting to a complete lesson plan, may be useful in guiding philosophical discussion about our obligations towards the environment.

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Upper primary/junior high school workshop: Too Small to Make a Difference? – Climate action and active hope

Please contact us to request permission to use this workshop plan.

Too Small to Make a Difference? – Workshop plan

Accompanying video clips and associated materials will be made available on request.

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Upper primary/junior high school workshop: Nor Any Drop To Drink: Water ethics

Original materials shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. Other materials are owned by those credited.

Note: The first part of this workshop parallels certain segments of the workshop ‘So Entitled’ (described above).

You can download the 80-min ‘Nor Any Drop to Drink: Water ethics’ workshop plan. Accompanying video clips are as follows:

• The Corporation (shorter edited excerpts)
• The River is Me (edited excerpts)
• Excerpts from Waorani, The People: The Waorani Fight for Clean Water (full documentary only available online)
• FenHolloway River video clip, adapted from Episode 66: The Brand, Swindled podcast. (Please support the independent producer of Swindled here.)

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Upper primary/junior high school workshop: Nature and De-extinction

Original materials shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. Other materials are owned by those credited.

You can download the ‘Nature and De-extinction’ workshop plan (pp. 1 – 7) and supplementary materials (pp. 8 – 14). This is a 1.75-hour philosophical enquiry into the ethics of intervening in nature, the meaning of ‘nature’, the ethics of de-extinction, and more. This workshop uses an audio clip and visuals:

• Download the audio clip.
• Download the Keynote slides (including excerpts from a comic by Jerel Dye).

As an additional activity, you may wish to play this audio clip (edited from the podcast episode ‘Introducing This Is Love), and ask students whether the spiders’ behaviours are natural, and whether everything natural is good.

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Primary school philosophy module: ‘Wild and Free’

Shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives.

You can download four philosophical enquiry lesson plans and associated stimuli and activities, colour coded by suitability for primary school children of different ages. The enquiries are entitled ‘Wilder Than You Know’, ‘Wild Things’, ‘The Wild Girl’, and ‘Wild vs. Domesticated’. Also included is a page of conceptual background for teachers, examining the concepts ‘Wild’ and ‘Free.

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Children’s Assembly on climate and ecological issues in Victoria, Australia

Shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial.

You can download the session plan and set of eight issues for deliberation and accompanying images for a Children’s Assembly, designed for children aged 8 – 12. A facilitator supports children as they deliberate on particular environmental issues and controversies in the state of Victoria, with the possibility of the children’s responses being later documented and submitted to Parliament.

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Recommended books (mostly picture books) for young readers on themes relevant to ecological citizenship

Recommended book titles (with links to book reviews) that could inspire philosophical discussion on environmental (and related) themes. 

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Junior primary school philosophy workshop: ‘Fitting In and Standing Out’

Shared under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives.

You can download the session plan and accompanying printable images (sourced from the internet) for this one-hour session for 5 – 7 year olds, which includes activities on camouflage and human beings’ place in nature (among other topics).

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Materials for a ‘Reflective Drawing’ art workshop on philosophical themes

The following three activities are designed for children, but could be used with older participants with little or no adaptation.

(1) Give participants printed copies of these body outlines and invite them to draw – for each emotion (e.g. anger, joy, love, fear, sadness) – where in the body they experience that emotion, how far it extends, and whether it has a direction. (To use this activity as the basis of a philosophical discussion, see the post Emotions and the embodied mind on our other blog, Playground Philosopher. And here are the cumulative results of this activity being conducted with numerous participants in the Emotionally}Vague research project.)

(2) For each of the modern-day mammals pictured here, here and here, imagine the sort of animal that may have once lived on the ‘evolutionary path’ as the species evolved from its shrew-like ancestor (the ‘Jurassic Mother’) to the animal you know today. Then, draw the animal you have imagined, and invent a name for its species. (Our post Imagining evolution on our other blog, Playground Philosopher, offers ideas for using this activity in the context of a philosophy workshop about evolution.)

(3) Show participants these four illustrations by Yelena Bryksenkova. Then invite participants to draw their own version on this template (with apologies to the artist). How would other species regard us humans, if they were to visit us in a zoo?

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1 (b) CLASSROOM RESOURCES FROM OTHER SOURCES

‘Of Fences’ by Peter Worley (from the book The Philosophy Shop) is a narrative stimulus for philosophical inquiry with associated discussion questions on the theme of property ownership.

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2. THE PHILOSOPHY CLUB’S OTHER RESOURCES

Blog posts by Michelle Sowey

• Wake up! Philosophy education and the climate crisis
• We need to shift the Overton window on the climate and ecological crisis. Here’s how.
• The philosopher activist: An interview with Violet Coco
• A thriving public sphere
• “We don’t want the world to die”
• Is anyone at the wheel?
• Jailed for peaceful protest

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A very short film about institutional power and accountability

This very short film about institutional power and accountability is an episode of Glimmerings, my twelve-part series concerning publicly engaged philosophy.

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Facebook page: Young Environmental Philosophers
All welcome to join!
The page Young Environmental Philosophers – Melbourne is for young people (and their families/supporters) who are big thinkers and concerned about climate and environmental justice. On that page I share articles that dig deeper into the ideas that underlie environmental beliefs and actions, as well as original pieces that explore my own reflections on current events and issues, as follows:

• Empathy and its connection with moral behaviour, with a consideration of the role that empathy with non-human beings can play in averting ecological destruction, as well as the the benefits and risks of anthropomorphism.
• The problem of ‘plant blindness’, including a critique of Victoria’s Western Highway expansion, with reference to Indigenous philosophies.
• Observations on our political climate and its prioritisation of economic efficiency and short-term self-gratification ahead of a concern for the wellbeing and survival – including a critique of Australia’s resistance to a Pacific-wide consensus on the phase-out of coal.
• The science denial, or brazen self-contradiction, in the rhetoric of the UK minister in charge of COP26 who acknowledged climate catastrophe while backing the UK’s plan for new oil and gas fields.
• The baseless assurances offered by a VicForests spokesperson that salvage logging does not increase the risk of wildfires.
• The use of motivated reasoning to justify a high-emissions economy and lifestyle, as exemplified by Senator Jim Molan’s attempt to defend climate denialism live on air on Q & A.
• The concept of ‘sacrifice’ with respect to nations’ unwillingness to sacrifice economic benefit for the sake of the environment, even though economic success depends on the health of the environment.
• The use of evaluativist thinking in protecting our natural life-support systems – including a critique of the Federal Environment Department’s decision to approve the clearing of critical koala habitat.
• The affordances of nature, and how we can avoid irreversible ecological damage and promote environmental goods – including a critique of the gold mine construction near Mount Ida, Turkey.
• The reasonableness of optimism vs. pessimism when contemplating our climate and ecological future.
• The failure to acknowledge how unsustainable our current way of life is with respect to the planet – a critique of a bioethics teaching document published by the Victorian Cu rriculum and Assessment Authority.